


Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise

by originally



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e07 Possession, F/M, M/M, Multi, Yuleporn, Yuletide 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-02-28 22:00:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2748683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/originally/pseuds/originally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It was hard, now, to find the edges, to know where Vanessa ended and darkness began.</i>
</p><p>Scenes during Vanessa's possession and confinement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brodeurbunny30](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brodeurbunny30/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Владей, каким возжаждется блаженством](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4420631) by [fly_with_balloons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fly_with_balloons/pseuds/fly_with_balloons)



> Happy holidays brodeurbunny30! I really enjoyed writing this and I hope you enjoy reading it. Thanks to Brigdh for beta-reading and making lots of extremely helpful suggestions. I take full responsibility for the ones I didn't follow. 
> 
> **See end notes for content notices.**

> _And demons and monsters shall meet, and the hairy ones shall cry out one to another, there hath the lamia lain down, and found rest for herself._
> 
> Isaiah 34:14

**I**

Vanessa sat at the dressing table, avoiding her reflection in the glass. The familiar weight of the silver hairbrush was comforting in her hand as she pulled it through her long hair over and over, grounding herself. Every night since she was a little girl–every night she had been herself, that is–Vanessa had completed this ritual: one hundred strokes of the brush before bed to make her hair shine. This, at least, she could do. This belonged to her, to Vanessa, and not to the… other. Lately there had been fewer and fewer thoughts and actions she could say for sure were purely hers. She could feel it even now, scratching just at the edges of her awareness.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway and a shadow fell across her, darkening the room. Her hand stilled with the brush halfway through her hair.

“Sir Malcolm,” she said, not needing to turn around to know who stood there.

“Vanessa.” His voice was placid on the surface but there was an undercurrent of something more there, something that made goosebumps prickle at the back of Vanessa’s neck.

He took a step forward and her breath caught. She could feel his eyes upon her.

“You said terrible things to me, Vanessa.”

“I’m sorry, Sir Malcolm. I… wasn’t myself.”

“I'm not sure that's wholly true,” he said.

Her stomach dropped and she slid her gaze away from his reflection.

“I'm afraid I don't know what you mean, Sir Malcolm,” she said, but she did know. There was a treacherous part of Vanessa that had relished speaking those words, aiming them like bullets into Sir Malcolm’s haughty flesh.

He ignored her and crossed the room to stand behind her, his hand capturing her unresisting fingers and gently prising the brush from her grip.

“One hundred strokes,” he pronounced, running his fingers lovingly along the brush handle, turning it over in his hands. “Each night, one hundred strokes–is it not?”

She nodded mutely, unsure of what his purpose was here. She kept her eyes down.

“You know how much it pains me to have to do this, Vanessa. I take no pleasure in it.”

At first she didn’t understand, but the look in his eyes when she caught his gaze in the mirror made it abundantly clear what he intended.

“No!” She tried to scramble to her feet, but he grasped her around the waist and held her fast so she couldn’t run.

“One hundred strokes. It will go harder on you if you struggle,” he said calmly, and she felt a thrill of fear. “Now, are you going to behave?”

He sat down in her vacated seat and manhandled her into his lap, hiked up her skirts and carelessly yanked down her underthings, so roughly that she heard silk rip. Hot shame flooded through her at being spoken to like a child, at being exposed thusly, and she felt her face burn with the indignity of it.

She was fighting his grip so frantically that the blow took her by complete surprise.

The brush came down on the back of her thighs with a crack. The sharp shock of the cold silver against her skin made her hiss between her teeth. She struggled futilely against Sir Malcolm's lap but he held her down with his other hand: unyielding, unrelenting. The second stroke hit right across the centre of her arse, and the third and fourth came down in quick succession, one on either side, before she’d had the chance to prepare. Each one made her gasp and flinch, and Malcolm paused for a moment to rub his hand soothingly over her stinging skin. She clenched her teeth in anticipation of the next blow, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of hearing her cry out.

He was hesitating now, varying the length of his pauses and keeping her on a constant edge of anticipation as she braced for the next stroke of the brush. Three blows came down in the same spot, sending a spike of pain through her, and she could feel tears threatening to fall. She blinked them back angrily. Her bare skin scraped against the rough material of his trousers every time she squirmed and jerked, and the combined sensations were almost overwhelming.

“Have you learned your lesson yet, Vanessa?” His tone was grim, that same tone of voice he'd used when she and Mina had been children and had misbehaved.

Vanessa stayed resolutely silent. There was a tang of copper in her mouth and she realised that she had bitten her lip in her struggle to stay quiet.

“Very well,” he said. “Perhaps we must take the full hundred after all.”

He hesitated and hummed thoughtfully. She braced herself for another blow, but it did not come. Instead his hand forced her legs apart, seeking out the wetness between them.

“Vanessa,” he said simply, one word filled with a whole lifetime’s worth of disappointment.

Her breath came in a shuddering gasp and she tried again to break his grip but he was too strong; he was holding her down bodily, pressing her into his lap with the strength of his arm on her back. His fingers found her clitoris and the sudden rush of sensation made her body spasm. She moaned, a needy, pitiful sound that she bit down on immediately, a wave of humiliation rolling over her.

Sir Malcolm tutted. “I’m sure well-behaved girls don’t make those kinds of noises.”

When he withdrew his fingers, she couldn’t help but arch her back, feeling the loss of his touch keenly. She was unprepared for the next blow when it came, directly across her sex. Vanessa screamed, unable to keep it in this time; the blow hurt, a sharp, hot smarting, but there was another sensation too, a throbbing that had nothing to do with the pain. Her feet scrabbled on the wooden floor as she tried to close her legs and the next blow came down awkwardly on the back of her thigh.

“Vanessa,” he said again, and there was something dangerous in his tone now. This time when he forced her legs apart, she let them stay that way.

He was relentless after that, raining down a series of blows on her buttocks, her thighs, her sex, until tears ran freely down her cheeks and she was sobbing.

He paused again and let his fingers find her throbbing clitoris with just the lightest touch. “Have you learned your lesson _now_ , Vanessa?”

This time she didn’t hesitate. “Yes, Sir Malcolm. Please, I’m sorry, please, please—”

“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” he said with relish, and rubbed her clit with his rough, calloused fingers. He had little finesse but her orgasm washed over her regardless, like a tidal wave, a white-hot surge of pleasure made transcendent by the sting of her bruised flesh.

When she awoke, she was alone on her bed with the brush at her side; Sir Malcolm had left no other sign of his presence.

 

**II**

It was the dead of night when he came to her. The witching hour.

“Are you you this time?” Vanessa asked, sitting up in bed, but he only cocked his head to one side and said, “Miss Ives?” in that curious American way of his.

“Mr Chandler,” she said, watching his eyes. The thing inside her had known his secrets, had read the little signs and put together the pieces that vigilant Sir Malcolm had missed. She almost wanted to laugh. “I’m… sorry for the things that I said earlier, about you and—and Mr Gray.”

The growl started in his chest, a sub-vocal rumbling that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She could not help but stare wide-eyed at him. “Those secrets were not yours to tell,” he gritted out. “You had no right.”

“I know and I’m sorry,” she said, genuinely remorseful. _I might have fallen in love with you_ , she’d said to the him that wasn’t him. _Don’t let me hurt anyone_.

Anyone else. She’d already hurt him, of course.

He paced across the room until he was silhouetted against the window, anger evident in the set of his shoulders. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides. If he uncurled them, would she see the red imprints of claws on his palms?

She remained silent for a long moment, waiting for him to make the first move.

After an eternity, he turned from the window and met her gaze, the moonlight making shadows play across his face. “We’re caught between two worlds, you and me,” he said, and it was clear from his expression that he knew she knew his secret.

“Ethan,” she started, and he growled again, sharp and animal and bitten-off. It triggered something primal and instinctive in her being that said _danger_ , sending a shiver down her spine.

His lips twitched into a smile as he watched her but there was nothing joyful in it. This was the smile of a predator. He took a step towards her and she clasped the bedclothes more tightly around herself, for all the good that would do.

“You had no _right_ ,” he repeated, his voice deep and dark as a cathedral bell. He had reached the bed now, had placed his large hands on either side of her huddled body. “Some things are meant to stay private, Miss Ives.” There was venom in her name, in the way he separated the syllables and spat them out as if they tasted foul.

_I might have fallen in love with you._

He was close, now, so very close. Close enough that his breath ghosted across the skin of her cheek. Vanessa reached up a hand tentatively to cup his face.

The movement was swift as a lightning strike. One moment he had been leaning into her touch, the next she found herself pinned to the bed with his hand gripping her wrists above her head. His considerable weight bore down, pressing her into the mattress and squeezing the breath out of her. The life out of her. She could feel the twin pinpricks of his teeth digging into the delicate skin of her neck; it would take so very little now for him to tear out her throat, just the merest turn of his head. Or hers.

Her heart fluttered like the wings of a bird in her chest and perhaps he could feel it, because he rumbled, “Are you afraid, Miss Ives?”

The vibrations of his voice sent a frisson through her whole body.

“Yes,” she breathed, and he laughed then, a humourless chuckle.

“Good. You should be.” The words were pressed into the skin of her throat like a promise.

She drew in a shuddering gasp of a breath and he rolled off her slightly, drew back to stare down at her with eyes that glinted in the moonlight. He fitted his mouth to hers in a rough kiss, his teeth worrying at her lower lip until she tasted the copper tang of blood. She returned the kiss, scraping her blunt teeth across his skin and digging her nails into his back through his shirt. He growled and sucked a bruise into the hollow of her throat, making her gasp. His free hand quested down over her body, lingering over her breasts before sliding lower.

“I can smell you,” he said, as he roughly pushed her garments aside and slipped a thick finger inside her. “I can smell your arousal. How desperate you are.” His voice was thick with contempt.

She moaned helplessly and bucked her hips and he laughed that dry chuckle again. “So eager.”

She could not even deny it, could only grind down against his hand, desperate for more pressure, more fullness. He pressed another finger into her and then another and all the time she felt his teeth digging into her skin, biting hard enough to leave bruises across her neck, under her chin, along her jaw. He was taking possession of her, or trying to: covering her body with his own and marking her skin like territory ripe for the plunder at the same time as he fucked her with his fingers. As he crooked them inside of her, finding that sweet spot that made her see stars, she cried out and turned her head to bare more of her throat to him.

The pressure of his teeth against her neck intensified until she felt them breach her skin, sinking into her flesh as easily as biting into ripe fruit. The pain was sharp and intense and she screamed with it, struggled uselessly against him. His thumb brushed over her clitoris, making her scream again; the sensations were too much, pain and pleasure mingling in an overwhelmingly powerful rush.

“Darkling,” he purred, low and sensual, and it was too late, it was far too late. As his fingers pushed her over the edge, she forced her eyes open, wrenched herself away from his bite so she could see his eyes in return. She found herself staring once more into the deepest blackness of the abyss; she could do nothing but ride out the waves of her orgasm as her blood dripped from his fangs onto the pristine white bedsheets.

 

**III**

The doctor wanted to examine her again and this time she was ready for him. She made herself docile, smiled a pretty smile and lowered her eyes to the floor. “Doctor.”

“Miss Ives,” Frankenstein said, stiff and proper as always.

His examination was cursory this time; he seemed skittish and reluctant to spend time alone with her. As he made his excuses and started towards the door, she jumped up and grabbed his wrist tight enough to bruise, her fingernails leaving welts in his pale skin.

“I know your demon, doctor,” she said softly.

Panic flickered behind his eyes for a brief moment before his gaze shuttered. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Miss Ives.”

“A most poor credulous monster,” she declaimed, relishing the feel of each word on her tongue.

The doctor paled; she had him. He knew his Shakespeare, after all. “How—how can you possibly know about him?”

“Caliban? I know more than that. I know about his _brother_.”

He turned his face away, but not quickly enough for her to miss his expression. That one was the key to the thing, she saw; the wound that she could use to pry him open.

“How did it feel, when the one destroyed the other? Your Proteus? How many creatures did you sacrifice to make him?” She shaped the words carefully, made them sharp enough to cut.

“Get off me,” he said roughly, abandoning his pretence of politeness and wrenching his wrist out of her grasp. He started for the door once more but she was quicker, darting around him and blocking his way.

“Oh, my poor, virginal Victor,” she said. “What a shame you didn’t get to sample what you made. I had thought perhaps you might wish to divest yourself of your virginity with me. But oh no, you desire to be _fucked_.”

“How dare you suggest-“ he started, anger clouding his features before he visibly pulled himself together, let the mask of propriety slide back into place. “Miss Ives, I’m afraid you’re mistaken. I’m not a—an invert.”

“My dear doctor,” she said, and smiled a slow smile, showing her teeth. “If that’s the case, then perhaps you should prove it.”

She stepped into his space and captured his lips in a bruising kiss. His hands scrabbled at her shoulders and he tried to pull back but she followed, crowding herself against him.

“Pleasure, blind with tears.” She brushed her fingers across his cheeks and felt him shudder at her touch. “I know a beautiful boy who would delight in doing it, you know,” she added conversationally. “He’s very good; I can recommend him personally.” She pulled back and grinned at him again, all sharp edges. “So can our good friend Mr Chandler.”

He closed his eyes and exhaled, the fight going out of him all at once like a marionette with its strings cut. It was almost disappointing. She guided him backwards to the bed and he moved without protest, sitting down heavily when the back of his knees hit the mattress. As she began to undo the fastenings of his garments, unbuttoning his trousers and pushing them down, she continued speaking.

“Of course, he wouldn’t be _yours_ , wouldn’t be the lover you fashioned with your own two hands, but we can’t all of us get what we want, now, can we?”

She glanced up at him. His eyes were tightly shut and he was opening and closing his fingers, making fists in the eiderdown, but he did nothing to deter her.

“Such _clean_ hands,” she said, standing and drawing one of them to her lips. “I wonder if you are so fastidious all over.” He opened his eyes then, wide, and she saw the fear in them—but there was want there too. She grinned to herself, bent her mouth to his ear and whispered, “If my boy were here, he would tell you to take off your clothes and _turn over_.”

He shuddered and complied, divesting himself completely of his trousers and underthings, and she admired the expanse of beautiful milk-white skin spread out before her. She took her time running her fingers over his curved back, his slim hips, his taut thighs, all the time feeling him tremble under her hands. It had been a long time since she had had anyone so perfectly innocent. She pressed a kiss to one of the rounded globes of his buttocks and he made a soft noise of surprise.

“Oh yes, doctor,” she said. “You can’t tell me you’ve never allowed yourself to imagine this. Why else do you keep yourself so clean, I wonder?”

Spreading his cheeks with her hands gave her a glimpse of his perfect pale-pink hole, tight and unspoiled. She trailed one of her fingers lightly across it, tutting as he gasped and jerked forward.

“Hush, now. So pure. No one has ever touched you here, have they? Not even you.” She kissed him there, wetly. He made a soft, choked sound as she flicked her tongue out to taste the earthy musk of that most intimate place, and she pulled back with a grin.

“Who are you imagining, doctor?” she said, working the tip of her thumb inside him as she spoke and savouring his soft gasps, the helpless bucks of his hips. “Maybe you wouldn’t like my boy, in any case. Perhaps it’s the dashing Mr Chandler you wish would take you. Or, oh, my dear, is it Sir Malcolm? I’m sure he’d be more than willing to despoil virgin territory; he always has been before.” Puffing out her chest, she imitated Malcolm’s resonant tones. “ _On your knees, son. It's the belt for you._ Would you like that?” To emphasise her words, she brought her hand down with a ringing slap on his arse, causing him to cry out, and marvelled at the way the white skin pinked up, beautiful and rosy like a maiden’s blush. But that was a distraction and she had a goal in mind.

With her thumb holding him open, she could press inside him, lick circles around his rim, tracing the edges and flicking the tip of her tongue against that soft pink flesh in a way she knew was maddeningly teasing. She finally relented when his cries became desperate, stiffened her tongue and fucked him with it until he was writhing underneath her and pushing back against her mouth. The taste was strong and sour and she revelled in it, all the sensations of him. She wanted to devour him, to consume him. She was almost unaware when he rutted himself to climax against the bedclothes, and she kept her mouth pressed to his oversensitised rim, licking and sucking until well after he begged for mercy, his voice ragged and broken as it echoed through the cavernous depths of the house.

 

**IV**

Vanessa was frantic, frenzied, desperate to escape. She pulled at the ropes that bound her, shrieked and growled and screamed profanities until her throat was numb whilst the animal inside her kept scratching, scratching, scratching to get out. Her wrists were chafed raw with it, angry red welts that oozed viscous blood down her arms, staining her nightdress. _No_ , she thought–and that thought was hers and hers alone amongst a morass of thoughts and impulses that belonged to someone, to some _thing_ else. It was hard, now, to find the edges, to know where Vanessa ended and darkness began.

They came to her constantly since she’d been confined: the three of them, together and apart, tormenting her, saying things and doing things and all the time the creature inside her was scratching, scratching. Sometimes Sembene was there too, brooding darkly in a corner or manhandling her for Sir Malcolm. Someone kept talking about a priest. Let the bastards come. She would be ready for them. Nothing was going to pry her out of this slut’s body –

Vanessa screamed and forced the thing back down below the surface. Hysterical laughter bubbled out of her, spilling from her lips like water over a cliff edge, a spring of familiar madness welling up from her insides. Her head lolled forward onto her chest, exhaustion overtaking her, and when she looked up again, they were back.

Sir Malcolm stood in the centre of the room, his back rigidly straight; composed and proper as always. But the figure kneeling at his feet was not proper. The doctor’s hands were clasped behind his back as he choked down Sir Malcolm’s stiff cock. His eyes were closed and he gave every indication of enjoyment, making muffled sounds of enthusiasm. Mr Chandler sat in a chair nearby, eyes heavy-lidded and laconic, watching them with his lips slightly parted and his hand slowly stroking his own length.

She shrieked and closed her eyes, but when she opened them again they were still there.

“No,” she moaned, screwing her eyes tightly shut once more, “no, you’re not real, I know you’re not real.”

“Vanessa,” Sir Malcolm said in that disappointed tone and she arched off the sheets, her wrists and ankles pulling at her bindings.

“No,” she said again, “you can’t be real, you wouldn’t—”

Even with her eyes shut she could hear the obscene sounds, the wet slurps and strangled moans from Dr Frankenstein, Mr Chandler’s soft grunts and the dull slap of skin on skin. Something to drown them out, she needed something, but her head was empty, or else filled with thoughts that were not her own –

“I weep for Adonais,” she cried, voice hoarse and cracking, “he is dead! Oh, weep for Adonais, though our tears thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!”

She thrashed against the bindings as she recited, only succeeding in sending a white-hot spike of pain through her wrists that forced another scream from her raw throat. She was weeping in earnest now: choking sobs that wracked her whole body, and hot, salty tears that mingled with the filth and blood on her face. The scratching was there still, a constant itch under her skin that reminded her that she was not alone.

Or perhaps she was. Perhaps all of this was a manifestation of her own madness. Perhaps she was still in the asylum and everything that had happened since had happened only inside her head. There had been those words they whispered around her. _Hysteric._ _Nymphomaniac_. Another frenzied cackle escaped her.

“Oh, Sir Malcolm,” she said, giving herself over to it, embracing it, “did you do this with Peter? Is that why you let him die?”

Sir Malcolm, or not-Malcolm, she could no longer tell, gazed at her with loathing in his eyes but said nothing. He tangled his fingers in the doctor’s hair, eliciting a sharp gasp.

She pressed on regardless. “Do you know, Malcolm, what monsters you have let into your house? Into your _bed_?” Her stomach roiled with fear and hatred as she forced herself to look at them. “Dear Victor, who creates abominations with his own two hands and lets them run rampant through the streets of London? Brave Ethan, who can change his skin, who can tear men apart with tooth and claw?” She stopped to draw in a shaky breath. “And you, _Sir_ Malcolm,” she continued, placing as much contempt as she could muster on the title, “are the biggest monster of them all.”

The words came to her lips unbidden and she spat them out one after the other. “ _Et occurrent daemonia onocentauris et pilosus clamabit alter ad alterum ibi cubavit Lamia et invenit sibi requiem—_ ” She finished abruptly with another piercing shriek that tore itself from her body.

When Vanessa opened her eyes again, the three of them were naked, twined sinuously around each other at the foot of the bed. There were acres of pale skin on display, glistening with sweat and seed and so wrapped up in one another that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Their hands roamed over each other’s bodies and their mouths were everywhere, kissing and sucking and biting.

She pulled against the bindings, letting the stabs of pain keep her present in the confines of her own skin, and screamed and screamed until rough hands took hold of her and then there was only oblivion.

 

* * *

 

She awoke in her own bed dressed in a clean nightdress and free of restraints. For a long moment, she lay still, breathing in and out, in and out, slowly and surely. She held one wrist up to her face to examine it, to trace the welts with her fingers and feel the sharp sting that told her that that, at least, had been real. Her memories were jumbled and she could only catch flashes of things: snippets of conversations, unearthly shrieks, an image of Ethan Chandler’s face as he held her against a wall. Forcing herself to stand on shaky legs, she sought out Sir Malcolm.

And if something scratched just at the back of her consciousness, she could ignore it.

**Author's Note:**

>  _She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf,_  
>  _Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self._  
>  _Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire_  
>  _Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar:_  
>  _Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!_  
>  _She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete:_  
>  _And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there_  
>  _But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?_  
>  \--Keats, [Lamia](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lamia)
> 
>  **Content notices:** dubious consent, spanking with an implement, rimming, biting, blood, canonical restraints, mindfuck.


End file.
